Mixed Metaphors
by happyharper13
Summary: Greg stepped into the grass -- away for good from the shadows he'd been chasing for far too many years... And then he laughed. Character Study. Slight Greg/Riley, implied GSR and unrequited Greg/Sara.


DESCRIPTION: He stepped into the grass -- away, for good, from the shadows he's been chasing for far too many years. Greg escapes his own escapism and rediscovers the joys of imagination and flirtation. Greg Character Study. Riley/Greg, implied GSR, implied unrequited Sandle.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Greg Sanders. If I did, he would be reading this over my shoulder, making funny faces and singing along to whatever is playing on my Itunes account. (And also shirtless.) I also don't own any of the other proper nouns in this story. I do, however, own all mistakes (more than usual) as this story in unbetaed.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Well, this turned out very differently than I'd expected. It was originally going to be a snazzier, fluffier Riley/Greg oneshot. Somehow it turned into something much more confusing, for which I apologize. I also apologize for what may be considered long dash and modifying phrase/clause abuse. The metaphors (and, no doubt, far too many literary analysis papers) took hold and wouldn't let go. Strangely, however, I'm quite happy with this piece, as it pretty much captures my perception of Greg's character development perfectly (albeit, sadly, confusingly). Enjoy! Feedback, positive or negative, is very much appreciated.

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Mixing Metaphors, Chasing Shadows

Greg was a flirt. A true, bona fide flirt. At least that's what she'd told him. _She. _She wasn't really _she --_ or rather _her_ -- anymore. She wasn't the enigmatic, all-important figure that could be, and _was_, represented in his mind by a simple three letters.

He decided, once and for all, to swear off the pronouns. Sara could be described as just another person in his life. For the first time in years, she could, to him, just be Sara. Just another person.

She always called him a flirt, but she never seemed to realize how he saved his best flirtation for her. And she never seemed to realize just how hard that flirtation was. It took guts, something Greg hadn't always had in spades.

It wasn't even that he'd had them for the decade he'd spent working at the Crime Lab. it was simply that he forced the brave words out. He forced himself to speak the sort of words that could lead to embarrassment. He forced himself to put himself out there, and risk the awkward silences, peeved tight-lipped barely-smiles willing his contrition and, on occasion -- particularly during hard cases -- the fervently, angrily chastising rebukes.

But, for the most part, he kept at it. He kept flirting. He kept joking. He could say he did it, even though nobody else did, but he couldn't help wondering if it was really _because_ nobody else did it.

The Lab had been growing darker in recent years, and not just because Sara had left. Not just because Warrick had died. Not even because Grissom -- who, Greg suspected, needed at least a modicum of light by which to read his Shakespearean texts, or wherever it was he got the odd quotes he came up with -- left.

No, it had grown darker because there was no light -- neither the tangible nor the intangible sort. No humor. No whimsy. And, Greg was loath to admit, it was because he was not there to provide it. He, Greg Sanders, had reverted to a former self, one he had sworn off with a passion, years ago in college.

He, Greg Sanders, had become serious.

No more flirtation with every other member of the Lab (or was it two out of every three -- he could never quite remember). No more jokes. No more clever titles for pager messages. On occasion, a pun escaped his mouth, but he was again loath to admit that that was, more often than not, more the result of his own sleep deprivation that it was of his wit or that substance of better days -- his courage. It took courage and willpower to flirt and joke as he had -- to put himself out there, risking the smiles and awkward silences and rebukes, just for the chance to see his coworkers smile.

Now -- _now, _he just didn't have it. He didn't have the _chutzpah_ that his former fellow lab rat, Jacquie Franco, had attributed to him.

He could try to blame it on Sara -- to say that he was in _love_, and that her departure, along with the harsh realization that she had been boinking the boss all along, had been the cause for his... _maturity_ (He knew there had to be a harsher word to describe that awful thing). But, really, it wasn't Sara's fault.

Had he been in love with her? Sometimes he told himself that the answer was yes. _Rationalization._ He loved her like a friend, and he held the infatuation of a boy crushing on the girl next door. Trying to make his analogy ring truer, Greg imagined, more precisely, himself as a child -- say 10 or 11 years old -- and Tricia Jasinski, the svelte middle schooler down the street.

Tricia had been two years than Greg. She had had (and, he imagined, _still_ had) sharp, slightly squinty hazel eyes (or at least he thought they were hazel -- as he'd learned again and again in biology, the green-to-brown eye color spectrum was rather subjective) and a mole on her right cheek (or was it her left cheek?).

The details were unimportant. Greg just remembered watching her. Idolizing her on the rare opportunities he'd have to see her walking back from school.

And those opportunities were indeed rare.

Warrick, in a sharp and surprising moment of insight (surprising because he, along with Nick and Greg, had been drunk off his ass at the time), had once cryptically remarked that Greg chased Sara _because_ she was unattainable. Because some part of Greg had always known that his slightly older and significantly (or so it seemed) more mature coworker would never return his affections.

In addition to being one of those now-very-rare moments where Greg ended up slightly under wasted, tripping through the bar and shouting out pathetic renditions of old Journey songs (and the ones that really _were_ supposed to die in the 80's, never to return in cassette players, let alone drunken karaoke), it had also been one of the few moments where he could not respond with a mature, witty, or at least amusing, reply.

It had been one of his few moments of indignity. One of those rare moments when he had no choice but to turn his head in shame and surprise, then glare, and then firmly deny the charges, insisting the accuser knew naught of what he spoke.

His adamant denial and indignity should have been an indication that the accuser did in fact speak the truth.

Greg knew by now, in all his sagely experienced-CSI-3-ness, that words like that didn't hit so hard unless they did something to unearth glimmers of truth, particularly those glimmers most buried in the self-conscience of the accused. Greg was, of course, in this case the accused. And Warrick's comment had succeed in cutting straight through harsh, dry desert soil -- brutally slicing apart long-sewn rationalizations in the process -- to the truth of the matter.

And what, after all of this thought (and, now, after that flummoxing and should-be-thought-obliterating combination of alcohol and case-induced sleep-deprivation), was the truth of the matter? What, indeed, Greg wondered, as he absently stirred a whiskey sour three months and two days after Warrick's death and eight months, two weeks and five days after Sara's departure, was the _matter _itself?

A ghost of Warrick -- the one that seemed to follow Greg around often these days, along with other older ghosts to whom Greg had grown more accustomed -- dropped the same words, or at least the same idea. Greg's drunken state sadly presented a dense barrier between theories and concision.

And what, again, was the matter?

A different ghost asked the question this time. Greg had long ago ceased trying to label and name them. Warrick's was the only one he felt obligated to recognize.

What was the matter? Again.

The matter -- the problem -- was that Greg never went for what he could have. He loved to flirt. Really. But, after the flirtation, what came next? That was got to him. That was the part he couldn't handle.

And Sara? She had solved his problems. She had been his panacea, his elixir. His mind fought for more poetic descriptors, but, again, his inebriation presented an impenetrable obstacle to his more SAT-worthy word bank.

Sara had been the solution because she met his criteria. A source of flirtation. An enigma. The unattainable, elusive woman of mystery and beauty. Of poise and grace and deep brown, slightly squinty eyes (just like Tricia Jasinsky's) that Greg _knew_ he could have gotten lost in.

She was the shadow of the night, and the moon, and the sun and stars, and of countless other similar, and equally clichéd, works of imagery. Because, in the end, it didn't matter which one she was -- whether she gradually emerged most nights, simply to justify time-proven laws of astronomy and physics, providing only faint shades of illumination to the night's inhabitants, and only when the mood (or, more scientifically, the particular time frame and temporal pattern) struck her, or whether she was a bright, blazing fireball, destined to burn out eventually (but not now) and leave temporary, yet still haphazard, dizzying imprints on the eyesight of those who stared too long.

Were the sun metaphor the more fitting of his options, Greg honestly dreaded answering the question of whether he himself had stared too long, or whether it was just another rationalization. Whether he simply blamed it on the sun because he didn't want to admit he'd really been staring off into space -- into nothingness -- and that that nothingness was capable of leaving the same imprints on his mind.

He knew, again, that his dread to answer the question was a sufficient indictment of his own intentions. Of, again, his rationalizations.

Because, in the end, it didn't matter which natural mass of sterile chemical compounds -- which mass forever relegated to clichéd romantic poetry -- that Sara best fit. What mattered was that he could never actually chase either. No one -- at least no reasonable person -- would. He could only chase a shadow, and that, he forced himself to admit, was his preference.

He could spend his life chasing, so that he had a pursuit -- a _mission_ -- so that he felt like he was doing _something_. He needed the unattainable, that holy grail, to provide the resonant, percussive _oomph _in his life.

Yet the problem with such pursuits -- with _anything_, like his toxin of choice for the evening -- was that he needed to find an _oomph_ on its own.

In the end, flirtation didn't equate to meaning. It could fill up his hours, and his thoughts, to appease his fast, fickle and insatiably curious, ever-moving mind, but it couldn't fill _him_. It couldn't imbue his life with meaning, nor could it cure the equally insatiable empty hole inside of him -- the one he, this time, wasted no distraught metaphors trying to describe. He knew that that hole existed in just about everyone, and he _could_, if he so desired, no doubt spend countless hours perusing straining philosophical trains of thought that meandered through explanations for the meaning of life. Yet he knew that, if he spent his life wandering, wondering and debating through the abstract, he would only enlarge that swell of emptiness.

So he chased.

He gestured at the bartender, whose eyes raised slightly and barely amicably in an expression of almost exasperated apathy at what, the bartender no doubt assumed (or so Greg thought) was yet another restless yuppie decompressing after a bad day. And at that, Greg couldn't help but smirk. _You have no idea. You have no idea how bad a day is -- or at least can be -- where I work_.

He inadvertently let a chuckle fall loosely from his mouth at the thought, and quickly realized (and the 'quickly' was especially impressive for someone so far onto the tipsy side) that the alcohol had pried loose a few notches of hard-wired self control.

He hadn't realized how many doors he had shut, locked and deadbolted in his mind. How many thick blocks of concrete he had set up to keep out similar displays of the fickle, shallow emotion. How closely he had lined the walls of a mischievous mind with iron gates and a stiff, hardy wall, to prevent the half-hearted escape attempts by his more wild, haphazard, _silly_ thoughts.

It was all for that chase. The more gates went up -- the more sturdily they were built and the harder raw hands pushed against the drying clay keeping his mind's floodgates still and pressing them firmly -- the more _serious _he forced himself to be, the further ahead he grew in the race. The more he could convince himself that he had a chance with Sara Sidle, and her world of poise, dignity and detachment. Of maturity and perfection.

He knew -- he _must_ have _known _-- that he could never win the race. It was just the idea of having something to run, to race, and to pursue that clung most steadfastly to his heart and mind. It was the idea of upping his pace, of passing opponents who never turned out to be separate, other men -- at least not made different by DNA --, but rather past incarnations of his own self. Past incarnations -- personalities, façades and, on occasion (and this one he had passed _long_ ago), the opponent that really looked like him.

He had ran further toward the front of the pack, still behind gray, blurry, expressionless shadows he had yet to meet or overcome, but in front of the more distinct figures -- the ones that bore past forms of his own face, only with variable degrees of dejection apparent in their stances and features. There was no finish line to the race -- only participants. With each one he passed, he felt the hardening -- _strengthening_ -- of his own soul. That was the only possibility.

He could only beat alternate manifestations of himself as he chased the moon. Or was it the sun? He would never know which one it was, because he knew -- he _had_ to _know_ -- that he would never reach it. And, at least so long as he ran on the earth (he could only guess that that was in fact the substance underneath him, as he rarely dared waste a second and look down), he could never touch these ethereal, extraterrestrial globes. He could only chase the shadow.

Emblems of himself were all he could defeat in his pursuit of the elusive shadow.

He set aside images of sterile, planetary masses and told himself the shadow was Sara's. Sara was tangible -- unromanticized.

Then he found out about Grissom. He'd known Grissom. Of _course_ he'd known Grissom. The man was his boss. The philosophizing, Shakespeare-quoting, humane-above-all-else entomologist was Greg's boss. And, somehow, he'd won the race. Which was especially odd, since Greg hadn't seen the more heavyset figure running. Not in his dreams, nor in the half-imagined panoramas that shot through his mind, bringing the chase to life -- or at least as close to it as the chase could get.

Perhaps Grissom had been too far ahead. His blurry form had been beyond Greg's range of sight. But -- as that little slice of mind that refused to sit still and quiet inside the sterile, strong, mechanical walls forced up inside his mind suggested -- perhaps Grissom simply wasn't there. Because the race had never been for Sara.

A scent -- a hint of reality -- distracted Greg, or, rather, ended his alternate distraction. He opened his eyes and left his dreamscape. An odorous whiff of the beverage beneath him elicited a grimace, and, for once, Greg was repulsed by his escape.

By all of his escapes.

Because, in the end, that's all the chase had been. He'd still been _running_ -- frantically? Maybe. Obstinately? Maybe. Pigheadedly and irrationally? Quite possibly.

The voice nudged through -- to his surprise -- a doorknob. Despite the stiff concrete barriers, there was still a _doorknob_. An unlocked _doorknob_. That was all he _needed_. The voice nudged the door open as Greg nudged the drink away. He rifled in his pocket for the appropriate bills, and he let the voice in. He didn't bother to push it away this time, or resurrect new mental walls to barricade it into some other distant orifice of his mind.

He was drawn to the voice, and he followed, closing his eyes again. It took him across different roads, and, when he looked to the side (he felt like he never had in the race), he saw flowers and overgrown weeds. An old car tire split open by a jaded piece of glass. An ugly looking cricket with only one leg (he was surprised he could see such detail) gnawing at a the last centimeter connecting a loose, withered flap to its slightly damp and largely deflated cardboard box. A dilapidated stop sign with words scribbled haphazardly underneath it.

That was what Greg noticed.

All the words didn't fit underneath the stop sign. They never could, yet they persisted, indomitably, stubbornly, _stupidly_ to sit underneath those absolute, negating four letters.

This time, Greg could read the words:

STOP tastelessness, gluttony, lust, tactless comments, crude humor, excessive flamboyance, weakness, sloth, lethargy, indolence, rashness, indiscipline, slobbery, messiness, fickleness, irrationality

They merged, and Greg could see the common thread running through. The common narrative to the journey that was no longer a race.

STOP Immaturity, Imperfection

Greg moved forward, in the dreamy, absurdist -- but somehow real and true -- landscape hidden behind peacefully closed eyelids. He felt himself drawn, not so much to the sign (though he was drawn to that too), but to the cardboard box.

The cricket jumped off and into Greg's hand. And Greg felt no shame in squawking just a little in surprise and what he knew was irrational fear at the insect. The lack of shame was surprisingly refreshing.

He reached for the box -- sogginess, deflation, slight stench and all -- and he helped the now-gone cricket with the last shred attaching the top flap by tearing the whole barely-connected rectangle off. He pushed the next flap aside, and finally reached his prize. It wasn't what he'd been chasing after all along, but it felt just as real and, he imagined, just as good.

Buried in the box was a bowl of paint. It was incandescent, fluorescent and shimmering -- somehow holding every color of the rainbow, along with every pseudo-color in between, some he hadn't even thought of.

This time, he paid no heed to caution and conscientiousness.

This time, he would make a mess.

He threw the paint in the air, and listened in surprise as the fragile-looking bowl hit the ground without breaking. The paint splashed over the sign, summarizing old ideas in a way he hadn't expected but had somehow anticipated.

The words disappeared underneath, but they weren't alone. The sign's original lone contents -- the four negating letters -- disappeared as well. And all that was left were three imperfect not-even-grammatically correct letters forming a foolish, adolescent, but, in this case, strangely insightful acronym:

LOL

It was the only order he needed. It rocked Greg to his core -- even to that empty hole -- in the best possible way.

He took one last look at the sign and its new, whimsical letters and stepped off of the road for good. He looked up at the sky and ignored the shadows. He stepped into the grass -- away, for good, from the shadows he's been chasing for far too many years.

And then he laughed. He didn't need to open his eyes to know that the bartender was staring at the strange man -- _him_, Greg -- who was laughing with his eyes closed, sitting, but not hiding -- never again hiding or escaping -- in a truly filling imaginary world.

Greg laughed for what felt like hours. It was jubilant, rowdy, raucous laughter. Overpowering bursts of air and joy and relief and confidence. And humor and flirtation.

Then, when he felt comfortable doing so, he opened his eyes, leaving his pseudo-dream, but knowing it would always be with him. Because, with his imagination in tact -- no longer barricaded in -- every scenario, every _possibility,_ _was_ with him.

"You seem happy."

He turned around -- comfortably and at his own pace -- to see the source of the becoming-familiar voice.

Riley Adams, the new CSI, met his gaze. Hers was mischievous, humorous and flirtatious. Her smile was crooked -- not perfectly symmetrical as Sara's had been. Various blonde (and a few browner) hairs escaped a loose hair tie. He could still smell decomp on her, but he didn't mind.

He smiled -- this time with equal flirtation, humor and mischief -- and laughed like the slightly wasted, but high-on-life man that Sara had, many years ago, accused him of being.

"You have no idea," he replied. With very little consideration, he added, "and I intend to stay that way."

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: Was this story too confusing? Or did it work? All reviews, be they negative or positive, are appreciated.

;)

Harper

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